Five more for June

In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto by Michael Pollan
by the author of Omnivore's Dilemma. His basic points -- Eat food (ie, actual food, not food product). Not too much. Mostly plants. Good stuff. 205 pages

What I Was by Meg Rosoff
meh. this was okay -- tells of the friendship between two boys in 1960's Britain, one who lives alone in a hut by the sea, one in a boarding school. Didn't really draw me in. 209 pages

The 10 Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer
The story of four different women as they enter their late 30s (?). was okay. Deals quite a bit with motherhood/career/marriage issues. 351 pages.

The Translator by Daoud Hari
Author is a tribesman from Dafur. Excellent stuff, tells of his experiences living in Darfur and elsewhere and translating for reporters in the area. 204 pages.

The Battle of the Labyrinth by Rick Riordan
This is the fourth book in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. I know some people are getting tired of them, but I'm still really enjoying them. Percy is a young teen (in this one it's the summer before his 15th birthday.) who is a demi-god (his father is Poseidon). I like the author's humor and just enjoy them. They are quick reads for me. 361 pages.

Buffy

Books I'm taking back to the library today...

Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips
Funny. Greek gods living in a London townhouse, losing their powers. 292 pages

Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishment to Love and Reason by Alfie Kohn
Love it. I think everyone should read it, whether you have children or not (it'll help you have a different perspective on children you see in public spaces. Talks about working with children instead of doing to them. 221 pages.

Buffy

sex sex sex

Finally I am done with this wretched book. It's called Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity, by Lauren Winner. I picked it up because she is one of the teachers at a writers' workshop I'm attending next week. But, wow. It's a book about chastity, and how sex outside of marriage is a sin. It's been really frustrating, not to mention dry/boring, reading. But I prevailed, because I wanted to be able to count my pages on this blog. :) I think that the hard thing is that she has some really insightful things to say about sexuality, but they're mixed in with some (in my opinion) really ridiculous statements, like that it's scandalous that college-age men walk around campus with their shirts off, or that she finds it shameful that professors teach wearing jeans. Come ON. Sigh. I would like someone to write about sexuality from a Christian-progessive viewpoint. That would be rad. 161 pages.

-Tamie

changing light

Changing Light, by Nora Gallagher, is a book set in Los Alamos, New Mexico in the 1940s. I'm not sure what you'd say the theme of the book is, but several of the main characters are involved with building the atomic bomb. There is also a love story, interactions with indigenous people, and an Episcopal priest. I like books that are set in places I identify with--and New Mexico is Arizona's neighbor. There's really so much culture here. Also, the Episcopal stuff. It's a good book. 223 pages.

-tamie

A quick post before we leave to camp with 40 other people

Murder at the Mendel by Gail Bowen
another in the mystery series set in Saskatchewan fairly intelligent stuff -- not total fluff.
213 pages

The Seventh Well by Fred Wander
Wander was a survivor of more than 20 concentration camps. This is a novel that is loosely based on his experiences.
155 pages.

Buffy in Denver

Cedimus

All right, folks. I read. A lot. But when one is intimately involved in a doctoral program, one's energies in cataloging and enumerating can only go so far.

I hereby bequeath my pages to the magic of the Internet, relinquish my claim to the most-read person on this blog, and encourage reading of most kinds. May the most obsessed reader win.

Jeremy, bowing out

anne lamott

Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith, by Anne Lamott. This is part of her faith series, which includes Traveling Mercies and Plan B. I really like these books. They are all basically essays about her life, about her son, her deceased parents, her church, her dog...and how her plain old life interacts with her faith and with God. She has had quite the life, and she is very real and very honest, and when I read her stuff it makes me feel not-alone. 253 pages.

-Tamie

the sun and MLK

what tamie said. (except June)48 pages.

April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Death and How It Changed America by Michael Eric Dyson

Really good stuff. Talks about how MLK talked about death before he died. The author gives Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and Barack Obama each their own chapter. The afterword is the author's imagining of an interview with MLK on the occasion of his 80th birthday. Very interesting book. 273 pages.


Buffy

the sun

If you do not subscribe to The Sun Magazine, you should rectify this problem immediately. May 2008 issue: 48 pages.

-Tamie

Whew, snuck back in just in time. :)

A Breath of Snow and Ashes by Diana Gabaldon
Last one (so far) in the Outlander series. So ya'all can stop hearing about them from me til next year, I think.... 980 pages

Resistance by Owen Sheers
Author's first novel. An alternate history of post-WWII, if Germany had won, set in the hills of Wales. 306 pages

Deadly Appearances by Gail Bowen

mystery series set in Saskatchewan. 267 pages

Welcome back Phoenix, and welcome Byron -- we like Terry Pratchett around here, too.

~Buffy in Denver

My first post ever on a blog!

Well, here's my list of books that i've read so far,
I'm not sure if i'm doing this right, but here we go,

My aunt sent me some sort of fantasy books that were pretty entertaining,
they were: Sourcery (260 pages), The Light Fantastic (241 pages) and The Color of Magic (210 pages) all by Terry Pratchett

I've recently got on a John Steinbeck kick so I've read the following of his:
Travels with Charley in search of America (232 pages)
Tortilla Flat ( 198 pages)
East of Eden (625 pages) this was a great book
and Sweet Thursday (260 pages) this is a sequel to Steinbeck's great Cannery Row

Also I read Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, for some reason I'd been resisting reading it for awhile, but my mother in law and my brother both sent it to me to read, so I thought that I might as well, it was a lot better than I thought it would be, and I'd recommend it (207 pages)

I read Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (around 160 pages) It was a great novel about the life and how that life changed of an African man in West Africa at the on set of colonialism

I re-read Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris (272 pages) and it was still really funny.

That's all I've been reading, but I'm working on a few more, so I'll write those up later
My total number of pages so far is 2665

Byron Ripley

Absence makes the heart grow abscessed...

Hello all,

Forgive my recent and total absence from this lovely project. Just popped on to update-- mine eyes must be failing me-- I can't be in the LEAD! Probably Jeremy and Buffy haven't updated yet for this month. Yes, that must be it. I'm surprised they haven't entered their daughter into this contest yet... she'd probably be beating the pants off all of us.

Tamie, I was sad to read your review of The Unprocessed Child, a book I've been looking forward to reading for a long time. I still plan to read it, but how sad is it that people can take such good ideas and make them into such negative commentaries on Everything Else? Narrow-mindedness is the Devil's friend (Nietsche. Or, you know, Phoenix.)

Anyway, I'm sad to say I've read very few new books in the past month. I've been trying to keep my spending to a minimum, and so I haven't bought new books and I only just took out a library membership (I know, I know *slaps own hand*). And the new books I have read, well, they haven't exactly been much good, or very interesting to write about. Many have had to do with starting a nonprofit company, and all the little details thereof.

Oh, on that note and speaking of unschooling-- I might as well plug my own project here. My dear friend Bryan and I have decided to start an unschool of our own-- a community learning center in which children can learn at their own pace, in their own way, and where we act as mere facilitators to education. We won't be teachers, and we won't be police. We'll simply be there to help the kids learn in whatever way would most benefit them, and we plan on giving the students a lot of control over their own education.

This is a new idea, and a long way from being operational but the pair of us plan to move next year to a location to be named later to start our unschool. Until then, it's planning by phone and email (he lives in San Francisco and I live in New York and we both have real jobs and all that, so we're not making progress quite as quickly as I'd like, but that'll change next year when we move to our new state and really dig into this). We have started a blog (www.unschooledcenter.blogspot.com) in which to write down our thoughts and hopefully, when the time is right, spread the word. It only has two posts so far because Bryan and I have both been very busy, but I hope you'll check in from time to time!

Anyway, I can recommend a few books, if you haven't read them yet. Lately, I've been very curious about the Holocaust and some of the books we're always hearing about but that I hadn't read yet. I give you:

The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank, Ellen Feldman
This is fiction, but it's a very convincing fictional account of what might have happened to Peter van Pels had he been allowed to live, come to America, and start over. Very gripping, very honest, and so authentic sounding that I had to remind myself more than once that I wasn't reading the real man's words. I think it is a very good tribute to what happened, and shows as much depth of understanding as anyone who has not been through such an obscenity could ever hope to possess.

The Diary of Anne Frank
Obviously, I also have to recommend this book. I had never read it before, not even in high school. No words, really. Just... read it.

Schindler's List
I had never seen the movie and I'm not all the way through the book so I'll let you know more of my thoughts on this one when I've finished with it. But it's very good so far. I can't imagine not recommending it when I'm through.

I hope everyone is doing well.

-Phoenix